Rambles and whatever tickles my fancy to blog about!

A friend has written a Great Yoga poem 🙂 It’s perfect for anyone doing yoga or thinking about getting into yoga and is sure to bring a smile. 🙂 It certainly brought a smile and pleasant thoughts to me as I heard her recite it!

My Inner Eye

My friend is into yoga
She practices faithfully
She tells me it’s done her a world of good
And it would be good for me

I resist, but she has an answer
For every excuse I know
Yoga will take me places
I never dreamed I’d go

It will open my breath, it will open my mind
It will teach my soul to fly
I’ll see things I’ve never seen before
When I open my inner eye

And so I cave, I buy a mat
I learn a pose or two
And sure enough,
The part about my inner eye is true!

Downward Dog on the living room floor
I see popcorn under the chair
Dust bunnies under the sofa
Wads of puppy hair

So today I’m getting my exercise
With a dustpan and a broom
Seeing things I’ve never seen
Right here in my living room

Thank you my friend
I now include yoga in my routine
My inner eye gets a workout
And my living room is clean.

One of my oldest T-Shirt design ideas is, Visualize Whirled Peas. It’s been a fun design that has done well for me. It is a bit dated, in that I didn’t know all that much about graphics or make it so that it could be enlarged more than so much.

Since opening a shop at Spreadshirt where I can sell T-Shirts that use Flock or Flex printing… I decided to update the design idea so it could be used in my Spreadshirt Store.

Flock printing is:

velvety feel, like a thin layer of plush

extremely durable

up to 3 colors per design

Flex printing is:

slightly shiny, smooth surface

extremely durable

up to 3 colors per design

With the limited colors available for these printing methods I ended up with this design.

Visualize Whirled Peas design for Flock or Flex printing

Quite different from the original, from way back when… The same idea, nonetheless.

Next, I modified the design for use in my Niftywares Shop that uses a different print method. Colors, shadows, and other effects are not limited there…

Visualize Whirled Peas design for digital printing

As you can see, there are some differences, but still the same basic design. Hopefully the updated design will do well for quite some time.

Are you wondering what the old design looks like? Here it is:

Visualize Whirled Peas design in Niftywares Store

Quite a change from one of my earliest design ideas to now.

Some details of how the update was done, for anyone interested:

The new design was created with Inkscape, a scaleable vector drawing program.

The first thing was to make the ‘Peas’ They started with a simple circle that was duplicated and resized several times to make one arm of a spiral.

Next was making tiled clones of the spiral that rotated around a center point. Lots of trial and error happened here in order to get a pattern that looked halfway decent. There was still a empty center after making the tiled clones, easily fixed by duplicating a few peas and placing them there.

Last was to add the text. For that it was a matter of finding the font and placing the text on a circle.

A little clean up and formatting and there was a finished design for flock or flex print.

Of course it really didn’t go all that quickly or smoothly at times… There was lots of trying different things and backing up to start over from the last save. Especially since I am still fairly new at using Inkscape and am still learning all the features and functions.

For the design to use for digital printing it was a matter of scaling to the proper size and adding some filters to the peas and text to make them look more 3 dimensional. Again some trial and error to get a good result.

There you have it, from start to finish it was around a day’s time. Planning and thinking… Well, that took a while more.

One of the great things about Farmers Market is talking to folks about fruits and veggies. Hearing their favorite ways to cook and prepare stuff. And… Being able to let others know the many tasty ways to use fresh goodies they see at the Market.

Last Summer I was lucky enough to get a decent photo of the Cat and Dog sitting on a Hay Bale looking out across the farm fields. It’s a rare day when the critters pose so nicely like they did sitting on the bale out in the Hay field.

This has to be one of my favorite photographs so I picked it for a Canvas Print from Cafepress.

Here’s the print fresh out of the package. It was nicely protected in the box. An inner cardboard protected and separated the foam bagged canvas from the outer box.

Cat and Dog on a Hay Bale Canvas Print

Here is the canvas print under a couple of 8 1/2 x 11 photo prints I had printed earlier.

Cat and Dog on a Hay Bale Canvas Print and Photo Prints

I’m happy with he way it turned out the colors and detail came out looking like the paper prints I had. The canvas looks good even with the fairly smooth finish, possibly from the UV coating. The framing, and packaging were all done nicely. It proudly hangs on my wall.

This Beautiful canvas print of the colorful dawn sky reflecting off water in the Mississippi river is available as a 20.00 x 16.00 stretched canvas print for $67.00. Only 15 prints will be sold at this price. The normal price is over $100. Offer expires on 03/16/2011.

I enjoy a morning walk around my farm and along the river with the dog and a camera. The beauty of nature, sunrise, and sights seen are a joy to behold. I love being able to share some of that beauty with a great photo. Mornings like this one on 22 November 2010 really capture Natures majesty!

This Summer had more mushrooms than usual and gave me something to look for on morning walks. I was luck enough to get some good photos of the Mushrooms. Enough photos to make a Calendar:

I’ve heard that Fairies like to camp out under mushrooms… So, kept looking for them and hoping to capture some in a photo. They must have hidden when I looked… Though, there are some shadows in a couple of photos that could be from fairies.

A short time ago several truckloads of partly composted cow manure were delivered by a neighbor. Yesterday proved to be a good day to turn and pile the compost. I got the TD-6 international crawler tractor running for the first time this year and got the job done. Took some video of the compost being turned:

After turning a few more times, this should be some great compost to spread in the fall for next years market garden crops.